A Giant Has Hit 35 Doubles And 35 Home Runs Seven Times Since 1883. Rafael Devers Just Made It Eight.

Mel Ott did it in 1929. Willie Mays did it in 1962 and Willie McCovey in 1970. Barry Bonds did it in 1993 and then did it again in 1998. Rich Aurilia did it in 2001, and Jeff Kent did it the year after that.

Then nobody did it for twenty-four years.

Thirty-five doubles and thirty-five home runs in the same season is not a famous line. Nobody hands out a plaque for it and no broadcast cuts to a graphic when a man gets there. It describes a hitter who drives the ball into the gaps and over the wall in roughly equal measure, every day, for six months, without getting hurt. Across every season the league's records hold for this franchise, in New York from 1883 and in San Francisco since 1958, it had happened seven times, to six men, because Bonds is on there twice.

Rafael Devers made it eight on Monday afternoon at Oracle Park, on the second of two doubles in three at-bats against St. Louis, in a game the Giants won 5-4 on the way to sweeping the series by one run three nights running.

He is hitting .258.

(That is the part that will trip people up, so let us deal with it first. Batting average has very little to do with this. Devers has come to the plate 629 times and turned 73 of those trips into extra bases, which is a different skill from finding a hole, and the reason the counting numbers are where they are is that he has been in the lineup for all but one game.)

Nobody else in the major leagues has done it this year either, and the arithmetic of that is small enough to say out loud. Four men in baseball have 35 doubles: Devers, Bryan Reynolds, Wilyer Abreu and Alec Burleson. Eight have 35 home runs: Kyle Schwarber, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Junior Caminero, Yordan Alvarez, Matt Olson, Hunter Goodman, Ben Rice and Devers.

One name is on both lists. Some of that is a slow year for doubles rather than a statement about Devers, and it is still a list with one name on it.

The day off#

The streak is the part of this that reads like an old baseball card. Tony Vitello kept Devers out of the lineup on Wednesday against the Cardinals and ended a run of 309 consecutive games. Susan Slusser of the Chronicle put that third among active streaks in the majors, behind Matt Olson at 927 and Pete Alonso at 562.

Vitello's explanation is the least romantic sentence available and it is probably the true one. "I think he hit a li[ttle] bit of a wall," he said, and then, on why the wall was worth respecting: "He's our best first-to-third guy, period."

That is a manager talking about a thirty-six-home-run hitter as a baserunner, which tells you what the previous two weeks had looked like from the dugout. In the sixteen games Devers played from August 24 through September 8 he scored seventeen runs and hit nine home runs. The National League named him its player of the week for the week dated the sixth.

He was back in the lineup on Friday and hit a grand slam to right field off Robbie Ray in the fifth inning, his 36th, which leaves him two short of the 38 he hit for Boston in 2021 and four short of 40.

San Francisco lost that game 7-5.

The rest of the lineup#

Here is the number that puts the season around him.

The second-most home runs by a San Francisco player this year is 21, and two men are tied there. Willy Adames hit his in 121 games before a sprained left elbow. Casey Schmitt hit his in 98 games before a torn meniscus. Both are on the 60-day injured list and the club's own page lists both of them as returning in 2027.

Behind them it is Bryce Eldridge with 16 in 102 games, Jung Hoo Lee with nine, and Heliot Ramos with nine, whose total stopped growing on August 3 when the Giants traded him to the Yankees. (Lee took 135 games to get his and Ramos took 74 to get his before he left, and they are level anyway, which is the sort of thing that happens to a batting order by the second week of September in a season like this one.) San Francisco has hit 167 home runs as a team and Devers has 36 of them. It has hit 246 doubles and he has 36 of those. The club's on-base plus slugging is .716 and his is .862.

So the eighth season on a list with Ott and Mays and McCovey and Bonds on it belongs to a first baseman on a 62-86 team that is eliminated, in a lineup where the next two power hitters are both finished for the year and the one after them turns 22 next month.

Anyway. Fourteen games are left and none of them decide anything, which is the situation in which a 309-game streak gets ended by a manager being sensible on a Wednesday.

Devers turns 30 in October. He has cleared 30 home runs in five seasons and 35 doubles in four, and he had done both in the same year exactly once before this, for Boston in 2021, when he was 24 and playing third base. Whatever the Giants thought they were buying in the middle of last season, this is a reasonable version of it.

The other seven seasons on that list belong to six men. Three of them are in the Hall of Fame. One is the all-time home run leader and he is on it twice. One is a second baseman who won a Most Valuable Player award. The last is a shortstop who hit .324 with 37 doubles and 37 home runs the year the Diamondbacks won the World Series.

Rich Aurilia is on that list. Somebody should tell him.

Sources: Every doubles and home run total above is counted from the MLB Stats API. The franchise list was built by querying this club's season hitting for every year from 1883 through 2026 and filtering for 35 or more doubles and 35 or more home runs, which returns eight player-seasons belonging to seven men and no others; the league-wide 2026 count was run twice by two instruments, a walk of every 2026 hitting line in the league and the league's own doubles and home run leader boards, which extend to 25 and 21 respectively and so are not truncated above 35; both return one name at 35 and 35. Devers's game-by-game doubles, home runs and runs, the dates he reached 35 of each, his fielding games by position, San Francisco's team hitting line, the club's individual home run totals and the standings all read from the same feed on September 12, 2026, between 10:14 and 10:22 a.m. Pacific. The grand slam, its inning and the pitcher read from the official play-by-play for gamePk 823173. Aurilia's 2001 line and Kent's 2000 Most Valuable Player award read from the same feed; the National League player of the week for the week dated September 6 read from the league's own awards records. The 309-game streak, its place among active streaks and the Vitello quotations via Susan Slusser, San Francisco Chronicle, September 9, 2026. Adames's and Schmitt's injuries, injured-list dates and expected returns from MLB.com's Giants injuries and roster moves page, last updated for those two men on September 8 and August 29.